Chapter Text
Dick Grayson sighed as he closed with the car door with perhaps more force than necessary. He took a moment to collect himself before putting his foot on the gas and turning the key, feeling the machine hum to life beneath him.
A moment later he was on the roads of Blüdhaven, mind racing with the information he had been given over the phone.
A body had been found in a dumpster; no blood or any weapon discovered, nor an ID on the child found. It was the last part that had Dick so upset about cases like this.
Nobody liked when it was kids, least of all Dick Grayson, an older brother to a whole flock of younger siblings himself.
Dick arrived at the destination given and parked in a nearby spot. His fists clenched on the steering wheel before he took a deep breath, then another. With a steely resolve, a climbed out of his patrol car and made his way over to the officers already on scene.
“Grayson,” Anvari greeted. Dick nodded back. Usually, he would be more than happy to chat with his patrol partner but at the minute he was absorbed with the scene, trying to find things the original officers had missed that would shed light on the scene.
Anvari, probably used to when he was like this, gave him the full rundown, “Civilian called about finding a body in a dumpster when she was out walking her dog this morning. We don’t have an ID on the body, but the cause of death looks to be hypothermia, judging from the blue lips and fingers. The body is severely malnourished with signs of starvation and looks to be around... 12-14 years of age. No decomposition, so it’s not too old but it's also winter.”
Dick nodded at the information, cold slows down decomposition, so the body could really be older than it looks, before asking, “Why call homicide then? This looks like textbook homelessness in winter.” He knew it wasn’t, but only from his nighttime activities, and usually the other officers were hesitant to look past what a crime scene looks like, if only to avoid the paperwork. If Anvari wasn’t the one who responded first to the scene, he probably wouldn’t have been called either, so she’d found something, enough to convince the other officers anyway.
She motioned for him to follow her further into the alley, putting on plastic gloves as she went. Dick finished putting on his own gloves just before Anvari kneeled next to the body, likely having been moved from the dumpster after pictures were taken, and gently raised the boy's arm to show a barcode on the inner wrist.
Dick ran a hand through his hair, gripping the strands for a moment before kneeling on the other side of the body.
As Dick talked out loud as he thought, “Barcode on the inner wrist, chaffing on the neck and wrists,” Dick, just as gently as Soraya had been, turned the boy's arm over to see the crook of his elbow, “multiple puncture marks on inner elbow, likely pointing to sedation though drug testing is not out of the question either.”
Dick looked up at Anvari to find her already looking at him, “It’s more than enough to get a blood test done, if only under the guise of identifying him and letting his family know.”
The last thing he did was hesitantly check the kid’s neck, hoping to find any sort of pulse that somehow everyone else had missed. Nothing.
After making his way back to his police cruiser, he made two calls. One to a medical examiner to get the officially call the cause of death and transport the body. The second was to ask an old friend for some help.
“Hey, I need a favor.”